The Better Build Podcast With Fred Brunel of Mission.dev

In this episode of The Better Build podcast, I was interviewed by Mission.dev’s Chief Technology Officer, Fred Brunel. Together, we delved into the obstacles and tactics surrounding the improvement of product development procedures within tech enterprises. I highlighted a prevalent issue where engineering teams often risk being relegated to mere feature-producing entities and expense hubs. This underscores the critical necessity of harmonizing engineering efforts with product management to fuel corporate expansion and generate substantial value for stakeholders.

For more about us: https://www.interna.com and find more posts like this at https://www.interna.com/blog

Key topics:

(3:42) The challenges of going back to an in-office setup with 100% remote teams 

(4:42)  Tips for maintaining esprit de corps among team members

(12:16) Why you shouldn't "cut to a number" if layoffs are necessary 

(17:28) The importance of historical knowledge and taste when using AI effectively

(26:58) Why we can be optimistic about the transformation of software languages 

Transcript:

[00:00:06] Announcer:

Welcome to the “Better Build”, a podcast that explores the world of software engineering, leadership, and the people who are shaping it. Let's get to the episode.

[00:00:20] Fred Brunel:

Hi David. Welcome to the podcast the “Better Build” what you been doing today.

[00:00:23] David Subar:

Thanks for having me. And things are good. Things are good. Just getting kicked off for today.

[00:00:28] Fred Brunel:

You're in beautiful Los Angeles.

[00:00:30] David Subar:

Yes.

[00:00:30] Fred Brunel:

Way better than Canada here. For now, it's all snow.

[00:00:34] David Subar:

I'm in short sleeves. I've got kids in New York who are bundled up.

[00:00:37] Fred Brunel:

Thanks for being here today. It's great to have you. A man of a lot of experience. You've been in the industry for a very long time, so I'm pretty excited about our conversation about it. Do you want to do maybe to introduce yourself?

[00:00:48] David Subar:

Sure. I'm David Subar. I run a company called Interna. In Interna, we work with private equity firms, VC firms, and product-managing engineering groups. And our whole purpose in life is helping make the process of building products more effective. How do you build quickly, release quickly, get market feedback, do it again. Again. People might think about it about agile process, but it's bigger than that.

[00:01:09] David Subar:

One of the problems that we find is almost all engineering groups will end up becoming feature factories, end up becoming cost centers. And that's very painful. And one of the things that we do is help align them so they always have a seat at the table. So they're always producing value for the companies. And the reason investors like us is they don't often understand why do I put capital into product management, engineering, particularly engineering. I don't understand what they do. And by tying engineering and product management to driving the company forward, it empowers the engineering team and it creates new value for investors. So that's what we do.

[00:01:43] David Subar:

We're all like CTOs and Chief Product Officers. I've sat in boat seats and we've worked with companies like the Walt Disney Company, with Linux.com that got bought by LinkedIn, with investors like Silver Lake. A lot of VCs, everything basically from a series or typically b series and bigger.

[00:01:58] Fred Brunel:

Okay, that's very impressive. Very high-profile companies. It's also not the first time I heard of any issues with engineering teams not being seated at the table or where the upper management doesn't really understand what they do. What are the deliverables? That's funny, because not only the big companies but also small companies are already struggling with this as well. It's a relatively young industry. We're still struggling with the same kind of problems.

[00:02:19] David Subar:

It's true, you know, it's I'll do just a little more about us because it'll give context. We're asked to do due diligence for investors when they're gonna invest in a company. We're asked to look at proc management engineering groups when for existing companies and say, what's going well? What's not going well? For investors, they might say, hey, we don't have someone in the seat, can you fix it for us? And so we'll sit in, we'll actually help fix the product managing engineering team. But one of the things that might be most interesting to your audience is we also coach CTOs and Chief Product Officers. Having seen lots and lots of companies over the ten years we've been doing this, we see patterns of things that tend to work and then do not. And the thing you say about this is common, it's true. And there are common patterns that will help in anti-patterns.

[00:02:59] Fred Brunel:

Okay, yeah, that's super interesting. Yeah, it's been a struggle, and we've seen that in our own business because we're a marketplace for developers. I've also led teams into early-stage companies, but very quickly you get to that point where the company grows and then you get disconnected from upper management. Then suddenly everything becomes really opaque, really opaque. Really hard to set goals, really hard to see the deliverables. You have a big injuring team sometime, or you don't really know what the individual is doing or whatever impact or contributions. So the visibility of the process itself is not there. So everybody got confused and everything got lost in true translation, how do you see the remote work as well? What were the impact on this?

[00:03:37] David Subar:

Yeah, it's interesting because for COVID, some of our clients were already 100% remote, but most weren't. And the things that we saw that worked in 100% remote teams, and this is for teams that were US-based. I'll talk about a different standard. When there were remote teams offshore, the US teams, the ones that work the best would tend to bring all the engineers in on a regular basis, say quarterly to the headquarters to work, the ability to know somebody, not to be a transaction, every conversation being a transaction on Zoom. What did you do for me today? What you do for me? It turns out that people are important, and being able to break bread with people has real value. So that was a pattern that we saw before COVID that worked for remote-only companies. During COVID a lot of companies got forced into that model, didn't necessarily have proper techniques, and it was hard to travel. Now we're back to.

[00:04:26] David Subar:

We can travel. But that doesn't address the question about what happens if you remote people in foreign places to the US. And what we suggest. This isn't the only pattern that works. We suggest co-locating teams as opposed to individuals. And there's a couple of reasons for that. If you have people that are working on the same problem in the same vicinity. They can get together the same way that the remote companies before COVID They can create us spree decor.

[00:04:52] David Subar:

The bandwidth of a whiteboard is better than Zoom. Also, you can make a team responsible and have authority over what they do. So let's say you have a team in Vietnam. I'm just picking an arbitrary place. You have people in Vietnam. If they're a team, they tend to be a lot more effective than if they're a bunch of individuals working on different problems.

[00:05:11] Fred Brunel:

I totally agree. We saw the same thing in our business, which what we try to do, we try to co-locate teams as much as possible. Because of collocations people are on the same schedule. They're on the same problems as much as possible. So it's not about the distance, it's about collocating people working on the same problem.

[00:05:26] David Subar:

That's exactly right. It's just like architecting software. Yeah. You have encapsulation. If you have the team in the same place and the same responsibility and the same authority. You've now encapsulated the thing. And you can measure the value of that thing. And the team itself can measure the value of the people in that thing.

[00:05:42] David Subar:

And the people in that thing can then become peers and can break bread in the same way. I was mentioning before. Okay.

[00:05:48] Fred Brunel:

Yeah. We observed the same kind of patterns and where it was better to use location for efficiency. But yeah, as you said, you work with customers where they were already remote. So that. Can I help during the COVID But yeah, now that everybody is trying to go back to the office, it's a bit of a complicated topic. But even our customers right now, they stay remote. A lot of them, I would say they stay remote. They can cut costs by cutting office space and everything.

[00:06:10] Fred Brunel:

But they do bring people. They try to bring people quarterly, you say, I seem to be strand where every quarter there's some kind of a quarterly planning for the whole team. So at least everybody gets on the same objectives.

[00:06:21] David Subar:

We have some customers that are doing exactly what you said. They went all remote. Now they're trying to go back to the office. It's hard, particularly when you're in San Francisco and you hired someone in Des Moines. That person in Des Moines is probably not moving to San Francisco. And you now have a choice to make. Are you going to let them stay in Des Moines or are you going to try to get rid of them? Switching costs on people, besides being difficult and breaking the social contract, it's expensive. So you're probably not saying to the person in Des Moines you need to leave the company, but you might try to only hire new people in your area.

[00:06:51] David Subar:

But now that also creates a social reactive black person works from home in Des Moines. Why can't I work for Iowa? In San Francisco, you would probably fix that problem over time. But it's not a quick fix.

[00:07:00] Fred Brunel:

No. Also, I think you go back to being. If you only want to hire people locally, you go back to being into super highly competitive. A market where prices are going to go up like they were before, which was insane at some point because of the scarcity of resources, and people have to be local. The price were insane in terms of cost for an engineer. Now the prices are starting to flatten out. You can pick people where you want, but now forcing people to go back is going to cause a lot of trouble. I've seen that the trend has not been reversed yet.

[00:07:28] Fred Brunel:

Actually in the same best. But it's not what people want.

[00:07:31] David Subar:

That's exactly. It's not what people want. Riot Games, the company that made League of Legends, always had a remote team in St. Louis. It was less expensive. High-quality engineers. It turns out intelligence is well spread throughout the world.

[00:07:43] Fred Brunel:

Yeah, absolutely.

[00:07:43] David Subar:

It's about finding the people, finding the teams, creating the teams that can do what you need. I don't think they need to be in San Francisco. Companies want to bring them back in. I don't know that they're going to succeed. Maybe they'll succeed. Not for engineers in other specialties. Maybe that'll be easier because there's not that price competition that you are talking about.

[00:08:00] Fred Brunel:

Totally understand. I've always been advocating this, especially store reps in San Francisco, which be more like an ego thing than anything else. It's not really reasonable in terms of cost and everything. And it's more like an ego boost to be able to have a huge team locally in San Francisco. It's the way the VC industry works, the way the startup works. A lot of ego in this industry as well. It's been a lot of layoffs. And I think there is some kind of a reset as well for the companies that figure out maybe in the end they don't need that big of a teams.

[00:08:27] Fred Brunel:

Maybe they can operate more efficiently. We're seeing that with Twitter. Of course, Elon Musk have been a bit excessive, is on the extreme. But I think it also shows that maybe a tech company deserve to be 10,000 people to operate a SaaS business.

[00:08:39] David Subar:

Right.

[00:08:40] Fred Brunel:

What do you think about it?

[00:08:40] David Subar:

Yeah, I. I think that's true in two layers. Three layers, actually. Not surprising that Elon Musk is extreme. He's extreme on everything he does. That's layer one. Layer two is the VC industry in Silicon Valley and San Francisco used to only want to invest in companies that they could drive to, and that's changed. And so I think that the pressure from investors in the VC side to have all your developers local has changed and that's not going to go back.

[00:09:08] David Subar:

And the other thing is, is over the last decade there's been a lot of platform changes that allow us to have smaller companies that have great leverage. Back when AWS was starting, before then you had to have your own servers. Now you can use AWS or Azure or GCP, and so you don't need as big of a platform or with OpenAI being able to build your own GPTs on top of that platform, it allows companies to be smaller and leveraged because you can use other people's technology and build on top of it. The need to have large exit technology companies, those still exists. And you can still build a large exit technology company, OpenAI being one that at some point be a huge exit. But you can also build smaller companies that may not be as big exits. You might take less in and exit with less out but have a great return or great lifestyle businesses. But if you look like Instagram, exit with a billion dollars and ten employees.

[00:10:02] Fred Brunel:

WhatsApp did the same, right? WhatsApp was also bought by Facebook. There were 50 people. I think there is value to highly respect these high-efficiency teams, very small people, high-value products. You don't need to be 10,000 people to do this. But as they get integrated, sometimes they get integrated into larger and larger teams and then the product disappears or productivity is way down. When you see these big tech companies, sometimes they are overgrown.

[00:10:28] David Subar:

That's an interesting and difficult problem in that it's like refactoring everything. What problem are we trying to solve? What kind of people do you need? How many do you need? Not this year, but in previous years the good news was there was tons and tons of initiatives. So there was plenty of places to put 2000 people. If all of those initiatives made business sense, this year we're in a year of cutback. 2023 was cut back 2024, I think will be cutbacks most of the year unless we see some good exits in the IPO market. So I think we're going to continue to see layoffs and some of these org redesigns will be more painful than they were before. I don't think anyone likes laying off anyone off. I hope they don't.

[00:11:04] David Subar:

But once again, it's like refactoring software. You need to have an.org design that matches the problem you're trying to solve, the people you're trying to serve. I really think about Conway's law a lot, and the reverse Conway maneuver, and thinking about designs and product management engineering that help create a phishing organizations that are serving clients.

[00:11:24] Fred Brunel:

Yeah, it was really interesting. I've seen the trend recently about what was the company. I think Twitch, we offer a bunch of people like Discord which company? But I was expecting it to be profitable because we totally operate something 100% SaaS. Except for the cost of infrastructure, there's not much to do. It was crazy to need some time. When I look at these numbers, they don't make business sense. But as you said before, the COVID were the craze of trying everything because they had a lot of free money and they wanted to create so many initiatives on everything, but didn't make any business sense. So now we can see some kind of a reset.

[00:11:55] Fred Brunel:

Right now with the advent of AI and what OpenAI showed, I think a lot of companies are trying to see where they can make, they can use AI in their product or internally, I don't know. And they try to refocus the company on this, but maybe it's going to go back, as you said when we're going to see the trend go back up, but maybe they're going to say, okay, I forgot about everything, we're going to rehire crazy, and then we reinflate these companies.

[00:12:16] David Subar:

I do worry about companies that are laying people off and saying we're going to cut 5000 people and just picking 5000, as opposed to being thoughtful about, once again, design. What is it we need to do? Starting from first principles. And my guess is I don't have data on this. My guess is a lot of companies are just trying to cut to a number, not trying to cut to a value.

[00:12:36] Fred Brunel:

What is it you're trying to do? That's really interesting to see. It's really sad to see all these people go and the wave of the industry being like this happened before, but I have the feeling it's a bit different than different.com bubble.

[00:12:48] Fred Brunel:

It's a bit different. I have the feeling sometime that we're back in like 2006 where before the iPhone, where we didn't know exactly what would be the next big craze. A lot of people were talking about Web Three at the time, which was Web 3D, AR, and VR again, which is some kind of the backup technologies that everybody would like to see but they never happen. Are we going to get a new application platform at some point where evolution can build a new business on top of this? I don't know. A lot of people said that blockchain will be an application platform where you can do this, read it out, but it never reappeared. AI for me is still a company that you can integrate to existing product, build on top of the web platform. But what's going to be the next trend? The rise of AI, the layoff, after COVID, the remote work, then the lack of new platforms starting to be precise, it's a bit vague and cloudy. What do you think about this?

[00:13:34] David Subar:

Yeah, I think you're right. I'm a little more optimistic about AI than you are as a platform.

[00:13:39] Fred Brunel:

Yeah, that's great. I would love to hear it.

[00:13:42] Announcer: 

The “Better Build” is brought to you by Mission. Mission is an award-winning network of senior-level software engineers and product builders, backed by a platform that helps engineers continue to learn, grow and connect. To get your team of fully managed, fully remote and fully flexible software engineers, or to join our community, visit us at Mission Dot Dev

[00:14:05] David Subar:

Here's my thought about AI. To the extent it's going to be platform, it'll be different than iOS in that it appears that foundation models are going to become common. One of the big costs in AI and Jet AI and machine learning is the cost of training the platform. And there's training the foundation model and there's becoming more and more foundation models that are open source and running it is cheap. And so the question is, does it become like Linux, which Linux was also Linux is a platform, it's just not owned by anyone. People then tried to build services on top of it to have differentiation like Red Hat did to some moderate success. They had a good exit, but so OpenAI is trying to do that by making an App Store and making tie-ins.

[00:14:50] David Subar:

So you have to keep stay with them. I think that there's going to be a lot of uses of gen AI and ML that we don't know, and I think it will be an accelerator to a bunch of things, but I don't think it's going to be an owned platform like iOS. And there's advantages to an old platform in that Apple keeps iterating on it. And I have iOS and I've got my Apple Watch and I've got CarPlay or whatever I have. I think this is much more, comes more like an open source with the Federal Trade Commission wrote an interesting paper about three or four months ago talking about monopolies, potential monopolies in AI. They were worried about, and they were worried about foundation models. I think they're wrong about data monopolies, which you need to change the foundation models or make your own model on top of it, which I would think that there might be monopolies in certain verticals, but I don't think there's probably going to be a general monopoly and then the monopoly on people that know how to build AI, which goes back to your early point about companies just hiring people and hiring people like we saw before. And I, and that will be interesting.

[00:15:48] David Subar:

That will be interesting. But I do think AI will change things. I think AI changes things in a different way. Whereas previous technologies were about blue-collar work, automating the factory, or white-collar work making a spreadsheet, so an accountant or someone could do things they used to do on physical paper. AI is interesting because it automates creatively and I don't know what that's going to mean. I think it'll be interesting, I just don't know what's going to mean. And that's why I think about it as a change. It's not a platform like I was, but I think it will be a significant change and we'll see.

[00:16:16] David Subar:

Maybe you and I should make a ten-dollar bet and then five years from now see who owes who dollar ten.

[00:16:21] Fred Brunel:

That's true. But yeah, as you said, it's really hard to see. It's already being integrated into product suites that make them even more powerful. So if they are more monopolistic, like when Microsoft started to integrate like a copilot in every other product, nobody is going to leave office, is going to become even more powerful.

[00:16:36] David Subar:

That's right.

[00:16:37] Fred Brunel:

So for them, and that's why they rushed to integrate everything, because there was, even if it's not perfect, far from it, at least the office became exponentially better and easier to use. For me, it's like AI is going to console, is going to reinforce with the incumbent. Is it going to disrupt the incumbent completely? With AI, can we replace Word, can we replace 100% PowerPoint? In that sense, I know you'd have to use PowerPoint. I see what you mean, see what I mean?

[00:17:01] David Subar:

Essentially because my wife used to proofread every major document I wrote.

[00:17:05] Fred Brunel:

Yeah.

[00:17:06] David Subar:

And she's now said, she now says to me, did you run this through Chat? GPT because my writing, my first draft of writing is generally pretty good but not great. She would be my, like, oh, you repeated this? She says, I always spell checked and I always grammar checked. She says, run it through chat GPT first and have it rewrite. Then look at it, then give me your final right. So exactly what you're saying, it's much more powerful. But I listened to a guy at a presentation, said, I know now why I took art history. Yeah, because he didn't need the tools of Photoshop or he was manipulating the tools. Now he had to just look at what was created on Dali or whatever and choose based on his understanding of what's good and what's not good and manipulate in exactly the way that you're saying.

[00:17:52] Fred Brunel:

Yeah, but yeah, you're totally right. I think, like, AI is still just a tool. If you were a creative person, I'm fine, but I'm not the best of artists. I just scribble and everything. But I've some of our friends, which are real artists, and they use AI in a way that I couldn't even describe what I want to see. You see what I mean? They use a describe, so they become the eye, become the painter, but they, the way they describe it, the way they want to see something, they do some description. Sometimes I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. You see? Yes, because it's going to do this like this, and then after that they're going to refine.

[00:18:24] Fred Brunel:

I don't, so I don't have to do the manual work of painting, but in my brain I know exactly what I want to see. And then in a way that's going to be. So you still need a creative director behind the eye. The eye is going to produce exactly what you want, but somebody is going to pilot this in the same way they used to use a pen or brush. That's the way I've seen artists adapting to this new technology. Instead of saying, okay, is going to become stolen work and everything. No, I'm going to be able to control what I want because in my brain I know exactly the output I want. So I've seen that being used the right way in the sense, like, instead of saying, okay, it's going to steal everything.

[00:18:59] David Subar:

Look, there's big IP issues that we don't understand, but that's why I think AI is going to change things in a significant way and I'm sure in ways that I don't know yet what it's going to change, but significant because if you can do that kind of description, whether it's textual or make them like this, here's some images or audio, this multimodal stuff they're doing that's going to have a bunch of applications. Now the question is this going to get overfunded before we find all these uses? And I'm guessing like everything else in technology, certainly will probably and it will crash, it will come back probably.

[00:19:34] Fred Brunel:

I see that as well because it's the usual cycle, but this, as you said, but this time it's a bit different because we've been like, as I was saying before, the evolution of the software industry was dependent on the application platform. From the mainframe to the way we work to the mini computer, the microcomputer, the smartphone, the web, it's an application platform but we program in a very specific way with a specific UI. That was invented in the sixties was the same thing and every growth being on an application platform and this time it's different. So I don't know exactly what it means, exactly how it's going to work, how you're going to integrate AI into the product, is it going to is different because at what point in a new application platform it's a totally different kind of tool. I don't even know. It's really even hard to imagine where it's going to be used. I'm pretty sure at some point somebody is going to do something and we're going to see that's it, that's the way to do it.

[00:20:25] David Subar:

And there's going to be a lot of attempts that fail before we see some patterns.

[00:20:29] Fred Brunel:

People are trying to teach GI to program to do this, it works, it doesn't work. Is it even the right way to do it? Do we need to write a regular programming?

[00:20:39] David Subar:

It's interesting. Who should have won this battle, was Apple. Apple and Siri because Siri is in 50% of the devices in the US. But this goes back to engineering their code quality and I read some studies about this and of course Apple doesn't publish this but it's all different studies from different parties. Their code quality was so bad that a release would take them four or five months as opposed to multiple releases a day. And if they fix that problem then clearly they’re working something that may be an accelerator of change. Obviously, Google's trying to do this with Android as well.

[00:21:13] Fred Brunel:

I see what? I mean, a lot of people have been looking at Apple as a beacon to see what kind of thing we should do. And you can see the industry is missing Steve Jobs sometimes you would have had a really interesting take on it. But I remember when he introduced Siri in 2014, I really thought they were there or they had some kind of a secret sauce where they could make it work. And then for ten years, the product didn't work at all because they have the mass of like software and everything. The assistant should have been there already, but you write they should have been at full front. I thought they were at the time, but they totally.

[00:21:43] David Subar:

They were at the time.

[00:21:43] Fred Brunel:

Yes, they were at the time everybody thought that's it. Just being able to have an answer and a follow-up question from Siri and be able to take action on something. It's not even done right now. In 2014 they demonstrated that you can ask Siri to move a calendar event in your calendar to switch for ten years. It was never worked. You're now starting to see companies trying to do the same thing with Chat GPT. Being able to describe a set of actions, to be able to build some kind of understanding is one thing. Taking actions in the software step-by-step integration is another thing as well because having two different kind of software talk to each other is a bit of a nightmare.

[00:22:17] Fred Brunel:

So it's not a solved problem. But you're right, I probably should have been on the forefront of this. If they abandon this, it never really worked. But also I think that the initial serial was based on LLM. At the time it was a totally different technology. But you're right. Yeah, it should have been. It should have been.

[00:22:30] Fred Brunel:

That's why Microsoft have been super smart and the opportunity to do this. That's why they start shopping crazy because they have integrated AI the way it is right now into their product. They may be able to want to win this.

[00:22:42] David Subar:

As of the time we're talking right now. Microsoft passed Apple as the most valuable company in the world a few days ago. Right? Satya has done amazing stuff with Microsoft. It was one thing like Microsoft or hate them. One thing they figured out is how not to become IBM, how to understand the trends that were going on in the industry, and fundamentally change the company time and time again. From DOS to Windows, from Windows to CD ROMs, from CD ROMs to MSN to some real online services. And now again it's pretty interesting. But once again these guys think about design and they make big swings and they don't try to do everything they do a lot.

[00:23:20] David Subar:

They maybe do too much but they don't try to do everything.

[00:23:23] Fred Brunel:

Yeah. To tie back to what you said before. Yes exactly. Your design is super important. Microsoft is very impressive. I would not have better. It was a different beast like 20 years ago. Our friends of mine works there of course a lot.

[00:23:34] Fred Brunel:

We know a lot of people everywhere but it's the totally changed and being able to change that kind of company of that size where all the people thought they would be the loser of everything but they become on top of the market 20 years after the.com and everything we would not have been foreseen. It's just crazy. Some of these big companies have amazing leaders. It's still crazy to think. Tommy is still crazy to think about. After almost 50 years of tech, the two top companies are still Apple and Microsoft if you think about it. Crazy if you feel about it, they were battling in the seventies, and in 2024 very still the two companies battling on the market. That's crazy.

[00:24:11] David Subar:

Yeah it's amazing. And look it's not just design, it's the way they develop software. They've learned Microsoft learned different ways to develop software for this era. They were slow to do it but they figured it out. Amazon’s another one. Amazon’s a different one. It's very interesting. They build a bunch of pods to build products and then if the product doesn't work they just kill that pod.

[00:24:32] David Subar:

I had a friend who was there for nine months and had six different jobs. He eventually left because he didn't like getting his groups killed time and time again in their e-commerce side. It doesn't work like that. But in the AWS and the kind of things, it's the different way of doing things.

[00:24:47] Fred Brunel:

I didn't know about this. I know some companies have the bot system, the feature teams and everything. So you have a pod which is totally independent. They do their experiment. They can run a lot of pods in parallel. If they like what they do, they kill the whole thing. Apple is organized totally differently internally and Microsoft over Amazon is totally different and they still succeed in their own way. But they have strengths and weakness at the same time because the model doesn't account for everything.

[00:25:10] Fred Brunel:

So it could be interesting at that stage of the company which is why Microsoft is a super interesting use case because they changed the organization structure to be able to accommodate, to change and that's really impressive to see. Really rare. This company is like Microsoft earned a lot of respect in the last years and they embrace everything and they support everything. It's the most developer friendly companies almost in the world because everything is open, not like saying that like 20 years.

[00:25:34] David Subar:

Ago about Microsoft, you said the opposite.

[00:25:37] Fred Brunel:

They were the opposite. Exactly. The speed at which they integrated everything into a product. That was really impressive. It's going to be interesting to see. It's still really hard to pinpoint exactly what the winner and the losers are going to be or where AI is going to be as well. Open AI. We see what they've done, we'll see the kind of craziness that happened to their company like a month ago, or some album being let go, we hire.

[00:25:58] Fred Brunel:

It was like some kind of a sitcom happening in front of my eyes. I couldn't believe it. Nobody could believe it. It was great. Yes. Still a weird moment for tech. Pivotal moments between, as you said, the way company are being reset to reorganize differently for this era. Our AI is going to impact all the products that we already use.

[00:26:18] Fred Brunel:

Are they going to change? And yeah, it was going to be the next-generation product. On top of what are they going to be built? Pure AI, a combination of VR and AI, or a regular product with an AI component on it. Assistance is still very blurry. And where is the blockchain and everything? I know the blockchain has been like, put aside for a while. After all the issues they had. Is it going to be back? It's really hard to see. For the first time in my career, it's really hard to foresee. I could always see something in the background.

[00:26:45] Fred Brunel:

In the age of the smartphone, you could see a smartphone will become something. It was not the iPhone yet, but it was a lot of companies. You could see the hardware. It's really hard to foresee right now where the next generation of software is going to be composed of a big.

[00:27:00] David Subar:

Believer in the transformation of software languages. What I mean by this is in the very beginning, people were flipping switches to make bits, and then there was assembly language, which was slightly closer to human language, and then there was COBOL and Fortran, which were slightly closer in that as we get different interfaces, not just a graphics interface, but we're getting better. I can speak to a computer that's going to change the ubiquity of computers because it's going to decrease the friction of using it with text and iMessage. I often just dictate it and see what it writes because it's easier than me typing on my iPhone. And I am optimistic that we're going to have more interfaces, which is going to add the ubiquity of computers. They're already everywhere, but maybe the interface I hadn't thought about this to you. So maybe the changes in interface is the next platform, is the next thing that gives us the opportunity.

[00:27:49] Fred Brunel:

Yeah, that's potentially as you're. We haven't figured out what would be the next interface because everybody say, okay, the voice, okay, it's great. But you need a screen, you need to see something. If you ask a system to give you an answer, the audio could be an answer, but you want to see a screen. So you also have the screen.

[00:28:03] David Subar:

That's exactly, yes. Yeah.

[00:28:05] Fred Brunel: 

And you also want to manipulate, you don't want to dictate everything. If you just want to pinpoint something here, this is what I want to see here. Maybe it's a combination of the VRA, or maybe it's the movie her. Where the guy is pocket. We already seen at the IP where there is some kind of a projection somewhere where you can at least people manipulate the data. I know it's a bit futuristic, but I don't know. I know some company are trying to do bits and here and there of this part. And also think about for VR to work, you need direct manipulation.

[00:28:33] Fred Brunel:

You don't want to have a joystick in your hand. You need to manipulate the work with your hands.

[00:28:37] David Subar:

We had a client that was building a VR device that you actually would project holograms in the world. Right. You could see through, you could manipulate the holograms with your hands. Exactly what you're describing. The problem is you have to have this thing on your head.

[00:28:50] Fred Brunel:

It's a big problem. They tried to reduce it, but it's still a big problem. But yeah, but as you said, maybe the evolution is going to be the UI or you interact with computer for so long. Even an Apple and Steve Jobs said when we embedded the mouse, we invented the viceroy. They productify the mouse, then they produce touch and every new generation. Yeah, the keyboard first, then the mouse, then touch, new kind of application. What's going to be the next generation of interaction with the computers? It's going to be the voice. Going to be a combination of stuff.

[00:29:17] Fred Brunel:

Because the voice, sometimes it's annoying, especially us human beings, really visual, we don't want to hear only.

[00:29:23] David Subar:

It's interesting what you say, because you pointed out something that I completely missed. I was talking about voice interface, is that the expressivity of voice is good. It's portable, but it's hard to say. I want to make that a lighter blue. Well, how much lighter? If I could just do a little scroller with my finger, I can show you exactly as opposed to. No, a little lighter. That. No, no.

[00:29:42] Fred Brunel:

Need something because we're very visual. You need to point. If you can say the okay, move this. This is the area you need to feel. You still have to describe. But there is some glance of that kind of interaction. You still use a pointer and a mouse to do this. In the future, maybe.

[00:29:58] Fred Brunel:

Can we get rid of the keyboard and the mouse forever and manipulate something else? It's going to be just an iPad with voice.

[00:30:03] David Subar:

That'll be interesting. I think you're right. The other thing about that is the advantage of software is the cost of deployment is very small. We're talking about screens, screens everywhere. To make that universal. That is big capex. So someone has to reduce the cost of screens, reduce the cost of deploying screens.

[00:30:20] Fred Brunel:

Yeah. So awesome.

[00:30:21] David Subar:

Thanks.

[00:30:22] Fred Brunel:

Do you want to add anything? David, great conversation. I could talk about this for days. So I've been in technology for years because I'm just passionate about it.

[00:30:30] David Subar:

You can't be bored and you can't be lazy.

[00:30:31] Fred Brunel:

If you want to keep up, you have to be there. But if you like it, actually, it's a lot easier.

[00:30:35] David Subar:

That's exactly right. Look, I love talking about this stuff. I love talking about how to make proc engineering more effective. I talked about four services. If people want to get a hold of me, they can hit me up. Our website is Interna.com, I-N-T-E-R-N-A dot com, I'm David Subar, or Subaru, without the U, S U B A R, you can find me on LinkedIn.

[00:30:55] David Subar:

People want to top up the stuff. I'm glad to do it all day.

[00:30:57] Fred Brunel:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's still top of the mind. Organizing people to work together is still complicated. Our mission, we do that all the time is a complicated topic.

[00:31:05] David Subar:

Even organizing teams, organizing teams, organizing architecture processes. If it was easy, we wouldn't be talking about it now.

[00:31:13] Fred Brunel:

Absolutely, absolutely.

[00:31:17] Announcer:

We'd like to thank our guest for joining us today, for all of you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast on your preferred listening service. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn and visit our website, Mission.dev, for more information on our network and platform. See you next episode.